Wimmer Lena, Ferguson Heather J
Department of Educational Psychology, Department of Psychology of Communication and New Media, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany.
School of Psychology, University of Kent, Canterbury, England.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2025 Sep 16. doi: 10.1007/s10803-025-07037-x.
Narratives are characterized by a temporal sequence of events and characters' causally connected actions. Thus, predicting forthcoming events is central to narrative understanding. Here we report an experiment that investigated anticipation of narrative events in autistic adults, who have previously been shown to have atypical narrative cognition. Using the visual world paradigm, N = 25 autistic and N = 25 neurotypical adults (matched on age, sex, and IQ) listened to non-social and social narratives in which a simple or complex context elicited anticipation of a subsequent outcome. For each narrative event, eye movements were tracked to four pictures, including two that depicted potential context-relevant outcomes. For non-social narratives, autistic (relative to neurotypical) adults were delayed in anticipating simple (i.e., factual), but faster in anticipating complex (i.e., counterfactual), narrative events. For social narratives, autistic adults were faster to anticipate simple narrative events (requiring basic mentalizing of a character's desires and intentions), and neither group successfully anticipated complex narrative events. Both tasks revealed a stronger constraint from real-world knowledge in anticipating narrative events in neurotypical adults, leading to delayed anticipation of non-real events and persistent interference from reality. Results show that autistics adults can successfully anticipate events in narratives, but do not achieve this consistently across narrative types; difficulties are not specific to social contexts. Instead, different predictive strategies are adopted, with autistic adults tending to be less grounded in real-world knowledge and more adaptive to imagined alternatives than neurotypical adults.
叙事的特点是事件按时间顺序排列，以及人物的行为存在因果联系。因此，预测即将发生的事件是理解叙事的核心。在此，我们报告一项实验，该实验调查了自闭症成年人对叙事事件的预期，此前研究表明他们具有非典型的叙事认知。使用视觉世界范式，25名自闭症成年人和25名神经典型成年人（在年龄、性别和智商上匹配）聆听了非社会性和社会性叙事，其中简单或复杂的情境引发了对后续结果的预期。对于每个叙事事件，追踪他们看向四张图片的眼动情况，其中两张描绘了与情境相关的潜在结果。对于非社会性叙事，自闭症成年人（相对于神经典型成年人）在预期简单（即事实性）叙事事件时有所延迟，但在预期复杂（即反事实）叙事事件时更快。对于社会性叙事，自闭症成年人在预期简单叙事事件（需要对人物的欲望和意图进行基本的心理化）时更快，且两组在预期复杂叙事事件时均未成功。两项任务均显示，在预期神经典型成年人的叙事事件时，现实世界知识的约束更强，导致对非真实事件的预期延迟以及现实的持续干扰。结果表明，自闭症成年人能够成功预期叙事中的事件，但在不同叙事类型中并非始终如此；困难并非特定于社会情境。相反，他们采用了不同的预测策略，与神经典型成年人相比，自闭症成年人在现实世界知识方面的根基较浅，对想象中的替代方案更具适应性。
